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Throw Back Thursday: James Lovegrove

3 years ago- posted by Lydia

Throwback Thursday: your favourite writers go back

Welcome to our new Throwback Thursday blog series, every other week we’ll be taking a peek behind the curtain of some of your favourite author’s earlier works, and we couldn’t think of a better author to start the series with than NYT-bestselling author James Lovegrove:

Writing World Of Fire

I can usually rely on it taking me four to five months to complete a full-length novel. The period of time depends, of course, on the word count and the quantity of other demands I have simultaneously. A sudden spike in the level of journalism commitments, for example, can add a couple of weeks to the total. I slow down somewhat during the school holidays, too. It’s distracting when the kids are home and doing their best (but often failing) to leave their dad alone in his office to work.

Four to five months may seem fast but it’s nothing compared with the rate at which the Golden Age pulp fiction writers wrote. Some of those guys could turn out a novel in a week. Even the slower penmen among them were managing a book a month.

They had to. They were living hand-to-mouth, surviving from contract to contract, and unless you were one of the big names working on one of the prestige character titles, the pay rate wasn’t great. For every Lester Dent (Doc Savage), Maxwell Grant (The Shadow), or Norvell Page (The Spider), there were thousands of lesser-known hacks hammering desperately at their typewriters, rushing to meet deadline.

What emerged from this frenzy to fill the ravenous, ever-hungry maw of the pre- and post-war story-magazine industry was often some very bad prose. Also, some very hackneyed and ill-thought-through plotting.

Equally, however, the pulp writers produced work with an unrivalled energy and urgency, tales that reflected the breakneck speed and brain-wracking ferocity of their creation by becoming compelling, page-turning masterpieces––the kind of thing you can’t stop reading once you start, skating over the infelicities of the writing and the often clunky characterisation just to see how it all turns out.

I don’t consider myself a pulp writer, but I bore the example of these long-gone pace merchants in mind when I sat down to begin World Of Fire. I was keen to capture some of the propulsiveness they brought to their storytelling. I wanted to re-create some of the spirit they imbued their tales with, that flinty fire and flash. I hoped to evoke that sense that the next action scene was never far away, the hero was only one step ahead of the villain, a reversal of fortune could come at any moment, and a long ladder of advances and setbacks must be scaled before victory was achieved.

I can’t say that I managed to complete the manuscript in a week, or even a month. It was closer on three months, from January to March of this year. But I belted through it all the same. The only novels that have taken me less time were my debut, The Hope, and my first Sherlock Holmes, The Stuff Of Nightmares (six and seven weeks respectively). Interestingly, in each instance the book was my maiden attempt at something, be it just plain writing a novel or writing a mystery novel––or, in the case of World Of Fire, writing a pure, outer-space action-adventure novel.

World Of Fire is the opening salvo in what I hope is going to be an intensive, long-running bombardment of volumes which will propel its hero Dev Harmer – stretching the artillery metaphor a bit here, but forgive me, it’s nearly Christmas – into all kinds of dangerous situations as he strives to keep the intergalactic peace between humankind and the artificial intelligence race known as Polis+ and not get himself killed in the process. The sequel, World Of Water, is on its way, and I’m managing to replicate the great blaze of creativity that drove me through the first one.

Write it quick and people will read it quick. If that wasn’t the pulp fictioneers’ motto, it should have been. If the author doesn’t hesitate or lose focus, neither will the reader. If you want to make something unputdownable, don’t pause, don’t think twice, just tell the story, and keep telling it until it’s told.

James Lovegrove was born on Christmas Eve 1965 and is the author of more than 40 books. James has sold well over 40 short stories, the majority of them gathered in two collections, Imagined Slights and Diversifications. He has written a four-volume fantasy saga for teenagers, The Clouded World (under the pseudonym Jay Amory), and has produced a dozen short books for readers with reading difficulties, including Wings, Kill Swap, Free Runner, Dead Brigade, and the 5 Lords Of Pain series. He lives with his wife, two sons and cat in Eastbourne, a town famously genteel and favoured by the elderly, but in spite of that he isn’t planning to retire just yet.

World of Fire

Released
26 August 2014

World of Fire is the first title in the eagerly awaited new series from James Lovegrove: an action-packed, sci-fi thriller that – appropriately enough given the conditions of Alighieri – is witty as hell.

Meet Dev Harmer, don’t worry if you’re not too good with faces, Dev’s probably won’t be the same next time you see him. As an – albeit reluctant – ISS agent Dev is used to waking up in new forms, although his current cloned host body isn’t exactly what he’d have picked out for himself, and the world of Alighieri where it currently resides is unlikely to win any tourist awards soon.

Alighieri is an infernal world, so close to the sun that its surface is regularly heated to 1,000 ͦC, enough to turn rock to lava and definitely not somewhere you’d want to get caught in daytime. Alighieri is also a valuable world, covered in precious helium-3 regolith deposits and unofficially run by the powerful mining corporations who extract it. However, with increasingly strong earthquakes ripping through the mining capital of Calder’s Edge, and rumour that the AI race of the Polis+ – man’s greatest galactic rivals – may be behind them, the industry of Alighieri is at risk.

Alongside tough, no-nonsense Chief of Police Captain Astrid Kahlo, Dev Harmer is all that stands in the way of the Polis+. But with his arrival stepping up the campaign of destruction being wrought on Alighieri, he’s certainly not making himself popular with the locals.

James Lovegrove is a NYT best-selling author, and his latest creation, Dev Harmer, is a fantastic new character who drives the action of World of Fire forward at an eye-watering pace. Following hot on the heels of his smash-hit Age of God series, this new series will appeal to both fans of Lovegrove’s previous works and lovers of action-thrillers.